


If Only my Heart Were Stone

by eudaimon



Category: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 23:39:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A truth: there will always be a war to be fought.  And Henry Sturges has pledged to make a stand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Only my Heart Were Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EK (ilyat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilyat/gifts).



> I really love writing Henry Sturges and I'm thrilled that I got this opportunity to write him for you this Yuletide. I hope that you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! ♥

A truth: none of the others will ever come close.

Even in 1865, New York is one of the best cities in the world to get lost in. It's far away from Washington to feel like a different world. Henry takes a deep breath and disappears between the surface, swims through the stew of the streets, the tangles of languages and cultures that are not his own. Like him, most of these people came to America from a different, older world - they came here carrying shtetls and homesteads on their back. Henry remembers it as a difficult journey, fraught with fear and upset - the one that brought him all the way from London to a new world.

His journey, of course, was far from typical.  
But all of those other journeys were echoes.

He remembers the shore as thickly wooded - it had been difficult to find a suitable place to come ashore. The New World (which was, of course, an old world to the ones who already lived there) had tried to throw them off at first. Somewhere to the north, Roanoke Island still lies in shadow.

By 1865, Henry finds New York a great city on the verge of becoming legend.

*

He disappears. For a long time, there is no such man as Henry Sturges. He worked on becoming so indistinct that light could pass clean through him. In a house near the park (something else that is _fighting_ to become - the men work hard through the long, humid summer evenings), Henry beings a library that focuses entirely on his long lost friend. Most often, he remembers Abe as a young man - tall and raw-edged as a sapling in new woodland. He remembers him as an awkward boy who grew into the self-possessed hunter. He remembers the speed and certainty with which Abe used to wield his axe, the sudden softness that crept in around time that he met Mary.

So many things unsaid. So many things to regret.

For a long time after Abe dies, Henry loses the will to continue. There is, after all, no war to be fought. He forms no lasting relationships. He works hard on becoming invisible to the world. New York is an excellent city for that. He can be anyone that he chooses.

(At first, when he sleeps, he dreams of Abe and so he endeavours not to sleep. He fills his nights with opium and absinthe, with beautiful, wild, high-geared fucking. He works on becoming a supernova. Later, years later, in the midst of another war entirely, when he reads about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he will recognise some echo of his own destructive power during those first years.

How badly he wanted to burn white hot).

Unfortunately, he was built to survive. To endure.  
It is, he reflects, the loneliest of existences, growing worse and worse every year. He is as lonely as God must be. He is a solitary as stars.

*

But it can't last forever. The heart craves noise. Henry's never been good at lurking in the dark; he has a theory that once a heart has loved deeply, it leaves a scar that never really heals. He carries his ghosts with him - brings his wife and Abe. Company is a salve. 

And there are always wars to be fought.  
Conflicts come and go. The smoke clears. Hunters do not last very long.

Henry's heart is grown smaller in his chest. He feels doomed to rattle around forever.  
Even New York starts to feel small.

But wouldn't everywhere?

*

Hell's Kitchen. They year after he passed Abe's true story on to a boy in a bookstore. An August night that swelters; Henry does not sweat but, as he crosses the thoroughfare, still wearing sunglasses even though the sun has been down for a while, he fidgets with the collar of his t-shirt anyway. The man that he is following cuts across 10th Avenue without waiting for the signal. Henry is still crossing the street behind him when he ducks into the air-conditioned darkness of the bar. It's the kind of place where actors go to drink after a night's work. Inside, it's crowded and noisy. Henry makes his way to the bar where his quarry has already sat down.

(In the boy's bag, there is a gun that he may well use to kill either himself or someone else. Henry has already decided that that can't happen. Some men, it's true, are just too interesting to die. These are the sort of men who burn the brightest, and never last as long as they should).

The boy knocks back his drink in one. Henry makes a joke about kissing girls.  
When the boy looks up, it's difficult not to see Abe's face in his place, just for a second.

*

Sometimes, it happens differently. Sometimes, it happens just like this:

In a small sitting room they turn in a slow circle, just like they might have if they were dancing in the days of Henry's youth. He eases the boy out of his jacket. He pretends not to notice the bruises. In the morning, he'll explain the challenges and offer a very simple choice - yes or no, fight or walk away. Not every one says yes. Not everyone can be Abe.

That conversation can wait. For now, Henry finds himself hungry for simpler things. He wants skin on skin, another pulse to crush against his. He wants open mouthed kisses that taste of tobacco and whisky and sorrow (which has a very particular taste, sharp and salt-edged). He strips the boy out of his t-shirt, traces the too-close to the surface staccato of his ribs under his skin.

"We can," he says. "If you want."

The boy nods without hesitation.

"Yes," he says. "Yes."

Things like this, times like this, are valuable because they remind Henry of what it was like to be alive. Stripping naked with another person, kissing first his mouth and then the racing pulse in his throat reminds Henry that, once, he was a teenaged boy who desired all of the things that teenaged boys usually do. He eases the boy down into his bed and then it's a mess of fingers and palms and off-centre kisses.

It's important because it's a comfort.  
It's important because it reminds him that the choice isn't always easy.

Afterwards, he wraps his arms around the boy's waist, pulling him in closer. In the dark, the boy is smiling.

"I've got a story to tell you," murmurs Henry, stroking his fingers through the sparse hair on the boy's chest. This boy who did not kill himself or somebody else, but showed that he might be capable of it. There . "And then I've got a question to ask you."

Context is important.  
The boy shifts, so that he can look at Henry over his shoulder.

"Alright," he says. "I'm listening."

The world has changed, and so there may never be another great war but Henry knows that the vampires will always be out there, regrouping, waiting.

And he has made a promise to stand.  
And so there will always be a war, of one kind or another in the end.


End file.
